Preamp Emulations for Studio Use

Hey everyone! Throwing this out there as I haven’t seen it discussed yet.

Seeing as the Quad Cortex has plenty of onboard DSP, built-in mic preamps and can be used as an interface, I’m wondering if the idea of adding preamp emulations has been discussed. Similar to what you would find through a UA or Antelope interface, but built into the Quad Cortex for studio or live use.

They could be inserted as a block and used to process vocals on the way in or to add some additional color to a guitar or bass signal chain, etc. Everything I’ve heard from Neural so far on the guitar and bass end has been incredible, it would be awesome to see what they could do in this realm too.

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Wondering the same thing! (hoping for the same thing)

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you can run a preamp into a preamp but it’s not advised… so it seems to me there would need to be a way to disable the hardware preamp which is built in.

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I am really hoping that we can do neural captures of our favorite mic pres and other studio gear (tube saturation and particular coloration from different vintage units)

If you treat it like a pedal you could at least capture the tone, presence and character of a mic pre…

Thoughts?

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A nice tube preamp emulation would be great for an acoustic guitar.

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I second this. It’s totally the logical thing to do. I haven’t got a Quad Cortex yet but if it can functionally take the place of my RME interface, that’s big value to me and there will be more reasons for me to buy one.

It depends on how transparent the onboard mic pres are and how low the latency is though.

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Tube preamp is what I used on Helix all the time. Can’t believe the QC doesn’t have one.

I like this idea. There is a capture on the cloud called classic API Pre. It would be cool to have some captures or models of SSL, API, Neve, etc. preamps.

I’ve tried several captures of various preamps on the cloud, and we made a few ourselves at our studio, but so far they’ve all been so subtle as to not really be useful. A lot of the tube saturation captures, however, provide more coloration and are much more noticeable

I tried the Neve studio preamp capture last night. It iWork’s very weak but no better than the Roland JC amp block with no cabinet, which actually seems to add more warmth.

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I just downloaded two Neve captures and the one API. You are right about the Roland JC adding a little warmth but all three have their uses, depending on the gig I have. Does anyone have instructions on how to capture mic preamps? Is there anything to be aware of or is it pretty much the same as a guitar amp?